The KOffice development team announced the release of KOffice 1.5 this week, with full
native OpenDocument support, and that is wonderful news. They would
like some help now. They are looking for bug finders and developers.

KDE's
Carlos Leonhard Woelz, who isn't part of the KOffice team, nevertheless
wrote to tell me a bit about the KOffice 1.5 release:

The main feature is the native OpenDocument support. It
takes a lot of courage to ditch your own file formats and jump into a
new file format you don't control. And that's exactly what the KOffice
developers did. Their contribution to OpenDocument is invaluable, either
by contributing to the format directly, or expanding the standards for
applications which do not have a OpenOffice counterpart, such as Krita,
(or Gimp), KPlato, etc... The KOffice developers also found several bugs
in OpenOffice OpenDocument support, bugs that can only be effectively
found if you have other programs generating standards compliant
OpenDocument.

In this release, Kexi, the long waited MS Access replacement, and Krita,
the painting and image editing application, matured greatly, and are now
competing for the best application title, in their respective classes.

Therefore, I believe that the KOffice release is excellent news, and
should be celebrated.

And if you look at the announcement, you'll find news on progress so
far on disability issues:

Enhanced Accessibility for Users with Disabilities

The decision of the Commonwealth of Massachussetts to base its
future
document format on open standards started a great debate with many
different people and organization taking part. The start of it was
Microsoft's assertion that programs using the OpenDocument file
format could not be used by handicapped people.

The direct outcome of this debate was that OpenOffice.org, KOffice
and vendors of other office software started to work hard on
rectifying
this situation. This version of KOffice has support for enhanced
accessibility through the means of mouseless operation and
text-to-speech functionality.

It is therefore our hope that KOffice can in future be used even
by handicapped users, and we are very interested in feedback on
this.

So, if the project appeals to you, please do try out
the new stuff, and provide them feedback, especially if you are disabled. If you
are not disabled, here are other areas where you can help with feedback
even if you are not a coder but like me, just a happy user:

Great care has been taken to ensure interoperability
with other office software that supports OpenDocument, most notably
OpenOffice.org. We acknowledge, however, that the ODF support and
interoperability is not yet perfect. We hope to be able to quickly
identify and fix the incompatibilities that do exist in the upcoming
1.5.1 and 1.5.2 bugfix releases.

The announcement says
they've doubled their development base from 15 to 30 since the last
release, but the more the merrier. Here's where you find
contact
information. Finding bugs is part of what makes FOSS
development so rapid, and we don't need to be developers to share in
that part of things. If by any chance you've never done bug testing, all you do is try out the application and if anything doesn't work just right, let the developers know. In addition to disability issues, here's what
they plan to work on next if you are a developer:

Regarding
future development, KOffice 2.0 will be released around the turn of the
year 2006/2007. It will build on the same platform as KDE 4.0, which
means immediate portability to Windows and MacOS X. KOffice 2.0 will
also include improved font handling, change management and improved
integration.

KOffice developers want to make testing as
easy
as possible for our users. Therefore, we offer to you an additional
method to testdrive KOffice 1.5.0 which doesn't require the replacement
of the last stable release on your system by current beta packages.

We teamed up with the klik developer team, who will provide up to date
klik packages for all of KOffice. klik packages may be used without
installation (they run, similar to Mac OS X "AppDir" bundles, from a
self-contained directory tree -- but klik compresses the tree into one
single file for easier handling). klik-bundles work on multiple Linux
platforms without disturbing the system's native package manager (see
also klik User's FAQ).
A Wiki holds details about KOffice
klik bundles and supported distros.

The announcement mentioned Kexi. If you're
wondering what Kexi is all about, here's some info Groklaw's vruz collected for me:

Kexi is another
relatively new and until now little-known application in KOffice,
that has been actively developed since 2002.
If you build databases for office applications regularly, Kexi
is great news for you. Kexi 1.0 is the first fully-featured version
of this integrated data management application in KOffice.
It can be used for creating database schemas, inserting data,
performing queries, and processing data.
Forms can be created to provide a custom interface to your data.
All database objects -- tables, queries and forms -- are stored in the
database, making it easy to share data and design.

Jaroslaw Staniek is the lead Kexi developer who has been
working on Kexi full-time for three years,
his work sponsored by the Polish company OpenOffice Polska, which sells a
commercial version of Kexi for Windows.
Even though the stable core Kexi team is small,
the project receives help from a broad test base.